The Marketing War: Corn Versus Sugar

Don't laugh, but I saw an eye-opening documentary on corn the other day. (That's corn the food, not Korn the band.) It follows two young filmmakers who farm a single acre of corn and try to determine where their harvest will end up. What they found may surprise you: Corn, in all its highly-subsidized forms, winds up in just about everything Americans eat. One-fourth of the 45,000 items in an average supermarket contain processed corn.

Thanks to federal subsidies that keep production high and prices low, high-fructose corn syrup is cheaper than sugar. The substance now sweetens everything from soft drinks to fruit juices. But here's the recent twist--sugar is making a comeback, and manufacturers have actually begun to market it as a healthy ingredient!

Education is a powerful antidote to this kind of sneakiness, and I believe the public is ready to learn. We see tremendous interest every time we offer a seminar on nutrition. Armed with good information, it'll take more than marketing voodoo to faze your employees.